MOBY P2P Wireless Network
Ananth Grama's group of eight PhD students focuses on various aspects of parallel and distributed computing infrastructure and applications. Work on systems infrastructure is centered around peer-to-peer (P2P) services networks, wireless (ad-hoc) services infrastructure, and overlay network topology and search. This work has resulted in the MOBY P2P wireless network, in addition to algorithms for efficient search (locality in P2P resource location) and service migration. Applications research in the group focuses both on traditional areas of numerical computing -- specifically multipole-based dense approximations, and emerging areas of mining discrete attributed data. The latter has resulted in the Proximus system for error-bounded summarization of high-dimensional data, and efficient distributed versions of Proximus. Research in the group is supported by the National Science Foundation, with equipment grants from HP and Intel.
The demonstration at SC2002 describes the design and implementation of MOBY, a network for mobile peer-to-peer exchange of services and data. Constraints on computing power of mobile devices, limited hardware, networking, and software resources, and ad-hoc nature of mobile clients pose considerable challenges from the points of view of supporting performance goals, ease of service integration, and adaptation. These challenges are addressed in MOBY by dynamic service location and client mapping, surrogates for mobile clients, and standardized interfaces built upon off-the-shelf software components. MOBY is a network comprised of interconnected Jini domains in which peers are Jini services and/or mobile devices. These domains provide hardware and software resources for the services. Services are exposed to peers via a secure search mechanism that locates requested services and appropriate protocol adapters for the particular device interacting with it. MOBY integrates a resource management framework, which allows dynamic replication and (re)location of services to regions where they are most frequently requested. The framework also maps clients to services at locations where they are likely to get best performance. MOBY is a fully functioning prototype that has been built by researchers at Purdue University and Motorola.